Reducing Droughts and Floods

Reducing Droughts and Floods

The world climate has undergone enormous changes in the last few years, creating devastating floods in some areas, and droughts in others, sometimes simultaneously. Currently, California is experiencing the worst drought on record while severe floods have taken place in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Tennessee and New England including New York City that flooded the subways, all between 2010 and 2013.

This is a proposal to crisscross the country with a system of pipes so that water in flooded areas can be pumped to drought areas. Each of these major pumping stations can have smaller spider pipes that reach out into the region. The water can be used for fire fighting, irrigation, or treated for drinking.

Valves on each section of pipe allow simultaneous independent pumping in different areas. For example, water could be pumped from Georgia to New York, while on the west coast water could be pumped from Colorado to Washington State to fight fires. This idea is offered royalty free for the social good.

The cost of laying pipe and installing pumping stations would be expensive but could be done in phases, and would create many jobs across the country. The cost of not reducing droughts and floods or fighting fires, measured financially and in loss of life and crops is even higher. This infrastructure project would be not unlike building the country's network of roads. This project would be low tech, and effective.

These climate changes would have been less severe if the U.S. had ratified the Kyoto Protocol in Dec. 1997. All the other major countries at that climate conference ratified the agreement, however the U.S. representative rejected it on the basis of costs to the U.S. companies with belching smokestacks. Now that the world is heating up, it will be much more expensive to reverse the damage.